


Half in Obligation, Half in Love

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-19
Updated: 2008-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-07 00:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"New York, thinks Toby, in a way which very nearly makes him stop the sentence altogether in disgust at its sentimentality, creates strange love affairs."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half in Obligation, Half in Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BlackEyedGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/gifts).



> For L., on her birthday.

New York, thinks Toby, in a way which very nearly makes him stop the sentence altogether in disgust at its sentimentality, creates strange love affairs. Between the snow and the Bridge and the lights of Manhattan endlessly glinting in the distance, he might as well be in an art-house poster, if they made them for middle-aged Jewish bachelors. But he still wonders if, without the city, without this space that this only theirs, it would work anything like so well.

*

"How's Donna?" he asks, as the best opening he can think of.

"She's fine. Planning things. Buying shoes."

Toby hides his smile in a look down at his shoes, which are covered in the same kind of snow that he imagines Donna walking through in heels, in D.C. He isn't homesick, because he is home now. But he does miss the sound of the sidewalks in the capital, which resound with the sound of their own self-importance, mostly, but still seem a better vocation than the dissolute, literary sound his own feet make on the streets of Brooklyn.

"Things?" he asks.

"Uh, things like ... the wedding."

Toby nods. "Yeah." He doesn't remark, even to himself that Josh says 'the' wedding, not 'our' wedding, though in a different mood he certainly would have.

"How're the twins?"

Josh's voice is quiet and curious. But cautious too, as though he feels like he doesn't have the right to ask. Toby wonders if that will change when Josh has the children of his own that Toby is sure destiny has in store for him; whether they will create between himself and his friend another thin thread of intimacy, or just give Josh the courage - the arrogance - to feel that he is entitled to share in Molly and Huck's small stories, because now he understands.

"Good."

And he wonders too, whether Josh's children will help to loosen his own tongue, because right now he just doesn't know how to share his kids with any of them, least of all of them Josh. The children are a part of himself he can't fit into his old life, or reconcile against the personalities of his old friends, belonging as they do only to their mother, and the new house in Baltimore, and the friends they talk about and he has never met, and to him: a small isolation of the world.

Or perhaps it's because family, the urgent love of family, is one of the last things he can talk about easily with Josh.

"Good?"

"Yeah."

"You persuade Huck to be a Little Leaguer yet?" Josh asks, some of the stiffness falling out of his voice. The only time Josh has ever met the twins he spent two hours in deep conversation with Toby's son, covering everything from football to baseball to Canadian ice hockey (Huck's fleeting passion at the time, before he realised just how violent its players are and how fragile he felt by comparison). This encounter was followed by a brief surge in Huck's enthusiasm for actually playing sports, rather than watching them on television and wishing he could. But Toby has always thought, with what he hopes is the correct amount of pity, that the kid is about as well co-ordinated as Sam Seaborn, and has encouraged him to read instead. If Huck's DNA has somehow seen fit to leave out the competitive perfectionism that is so intrinsic to both of his parents, Toby isn't going to argue.

"He's resolutely uninterested."

"He's got a good arm, Toby."

"You played catch with him for half an hour, Josh. In what was a really astonishing display of bullying and antagonism."

"Yeah, but I got him to throw well."

"I'll bill you for the psychiatrist then."

Josh smiles. Toby allows the upper part of his arm, swathed in overcoat and jacket and shirt, to bump against Josh's shoulder as they walk. And it feels like companionship, at last. Like he finally knows what Josh is doing here.

*

Josh has never been the same kind of friend as the others were. Not like CJ, who sends him stupid postcards of Santa Barbara with her tiny handwriting crowded onto them. She's sent so many now that she's starting to repeat the views and Toby has started to wonder if there's a pattern in it somewhere which he can't see. She writes about Danny and her daughter and whatever insanity of her boss she thinks he will find most amusing that week and she always signs off with _I miss you_, which he always finds odd (because they've never had much need for declarations) but still valuable; touching, even, if he didn't hate that word.

Sam prefers calling him, and does, wilfully, with an unerring knack for picking the most inconvenient moments and forgetting the fact that Toby's day operates under Eastern Standard Time and Sam's under Pacific. Usually he wants Toby's opinion on something, on this or that policy he's thinking about, how this might poll or that sound when he reads it out to an audience of thousands. Usually, Toby doesn't understand why he's asking, since he learnt all this stuff years and years ago, and didn't need much help then. But he always answers whatever asinine question Sam is asking, and sometimes, when that is done and instead of thanking him and hanging up, Sam will talk; they will just talk. And then it's Toby who feels like confessing, _I miss you_, even though he knows he never will.

But Josh is different. Nothing like so easy. The emotions he inspires all confused and desperate, still stalled in an anger that became a habit long before they threw any punches at each other. There is something in Josh which infuriates Toby, and vice versa, he thinks. Perhaps because they ought to be so alike and aren't and the difference twists into something insurmountable, and utterly permanent. Toby doesn't understand how to get around it, and neither does Josh. So they do this instead, every now and then.

Yesterday was the launch for Toby's second novel. The gathered critics of New York, in what Toby saw more as evidence of their ignorance than of their good taste, had lavished praise on his first. Toby didn't expect the same for the second, not with what he knows about luck and the book business, but he's wrong - again - and his agent has been calling him all day to tell him about this or that amazing review in some paper he despises. Somehow he's become famous enough that they're sending him on a signing tour (a short one), due to start in a week from today. Toby has been imagining an experience not unlike the campaign trail, forgetting only that he will be the main attraction this time and will not be permitted to hide in the bus.

Josh wanted to see the launch, which is why he's here, walking through snow-soaked Brooklyn with Toby. He wanted to stay on, he said - using an immaculate new excuse in doing so - and make sure Toby didn't take half his library with him in his touring bags and forget to pack socks. Toby wondered, aloud, if CJ had put him up to it, but Josh was adamant that it was all his own plan. And Toby had smiled down the phone, just like old times, and said, Okay, I'll see you soon.

And here Josh is.

He's a little quieter these days, doesn't bounce on his heels so much, and has aged in other ways which Toby suspects are mirrored in himself. There's more gray than ordinary brown in his curls now, and the brown is turning darker, so that in a dim light it could be mistaken for black. His dimples are more pronounced when he smiles, which he doesn't often. And his shoulders, under Toby's hands in the dark, are sharp through muscle, rounded points which almost hurt when Toby strokes his fingers over them. Or perhaps that is down to the low, buzzing feeling which lurks at the back of Toby's mind: that this is crazy; that he has two small children and an ex-wife he's still half in love with in Baltimore; that Josh is a few months from having a wife of his own; that Josh still has a career to think of, even if no-one cares that Toby Ziegler, dissolute writer and resident of Brooklyn, NY, is occasionally fucking a man who was once one of his best friends.

That they were never best friends at all.

*

It seems a very long time ago, though it was all of four years in unembellished, actual time. For Toby the encounter has stretched the days around itself, feeling sometimes very close and sometimes like something he did when he was young and stupid; like someone he hardly remembers.

He has no trouble remembering how angry he was with Josh, how everything seemed bound up with his betrayal - the last brother to be lost, and Toby low but not about to beg, not asking anyone's pardon. He has always suspected that it was Josh who swung the pardon and in his darker moments Toby was sure he had done it just to spite him, just to show him that everything needn't be darkness; that he was selfish and stupid and standing for a principle no-one else cared about, and about to ruin his life for it, and the lives of three other people. And Toby had spent many days locked in his apartment, replaying the blows they exchanged, and wishing he could replay them for real. So that when Josh actually came to his door, for the first time after the letter with the Seal of the President arrived, all Toby's instincts were for violence. But for him desire has always been violent; needful and angry and incomprehensible, like Josh himself, or at least the Josh who lives in Toby's heart.

He was still surprised when Josh reached out for him, though. If not quite so surprised as he was when he found himself reciprocating.

Toby supposes Josh meant it as an apology, and perhaps he meant the same, or perhaps this is the apology - now, a quiet bed in Brooklyn and nothing expected, not even the embraces they fall into, almost without meaning to. Sometimes when Josh comes to New York they have sex and sometimes they don't. Toby doesn't mind and doesn't think Josh does either, because it's not the sex which is important, but that they continue to wrestle with this long drawn-out conversation of a relationship they have, which is unlike any other and equally puzzling to both of them; some days hating each other and other days clinging to each other, and other days, like this one, contented by a walk in the snow and the brush of their shoulders every so often.

*

In bed, in the dark, Toby remembers the night of the shooting. They've both had the other one's blood on their hands and sometimes, coming out of a nightmare, Toby mistakes the warmth of skin and closeness for the warmth of that blood, that night. He always wakes with a gasp and an empty cry in his mouth. He never can make his lips form the sound of Josh's name because that's the word he needs to scream, impotently, into the crowd. He covers his face with his hands and tries not to cry and tries not to wake Josh with the exaggerated sounds of his breathing or the beat of his heart, which sounds so loud he's sure it will provoke complaints from his neighbours.

Josh is always awake within a few seconds, with his hand resting on the round of Toby's shoulder.

"Nightmare?"

"Nightmare."

"What about?" Josh says, sounding concerned. He sounds much older, in the middle of the night.

"You don't want to know."

He has a vague idea that Josh thinks he is dreaming about his children, about some horrible fate coming to them, blood and injury and death. Some new flakiness which fatherhood has infected him with so that, separated from his kids, he must dream about their mutilation. But Toby supposes he's half right, and it's not Josh's fault that he can't know that he only wakes up with a nightmare in his heart when Josh is sharing his bed.

Usually the way to reset the strange fibrillations of his body is to reach for Josh's: to reassure his fingers that there is nothing but smooth skin at his flank, no sticky blood there and the only intake of breath made in pleasure and not in pain. Toby will place his palm in the centre of Josh's chest and check for a heartbeat, then cover his forehead to wipe away sweat which is not there, not yet. And when Josh opens his mouth to ask the inevitable question, Toby will cover it with a kiss, and Josh will stop wondering, he hopes. At least he has never asked the right question, not yet. Toby is glad, and hopes he never will.

Has it been going on that long? is the question Toby always asks himself. He is sure the answer is 'no', or sure enough. There's a perfectly awful endless love affair already on his books from that time, and before, and his heart isn't the kind that lets more than one of those in at once. But he still wonders.

He has a perfect memory of Josh sitting with his hands pressed against his belly and the blood flowing around his fingers and the arc his body described falling towards the concrete and the heavy, sticky warmth he was in Toby's hands and the way his hair smelled of the night air, and a little like a night garden in bloom. Toby remembers sacrificing the support of one hand, just for a second, so that he could put his blood-stained fingers into that hair and how he worried, irrationally and exactly like someone who has just held the dying body of someone he loves in his arms, that the doctors would come round to ask who soiled his hair like that, who took their hands off the wound for something as frivolous as stroking a grievously injured man's hair.

As Josh pushes against him, in bed, in the dark, Toby always thinks of that night, that small series of moments. And he'll let Josh do anything so long as he can have his fingers in his hair, so that he can remember. So that he doesn't forget. And it becomes a tapestry of guilt and responsibility and anger, red as blood between their bodies, as Josh's cock rubs against his own and his mouth yawns his orgasm over the hollow of Toby's throat, and Toby's fingers twist in his hair, remembering, half in obligation and half in love.


End file.
